Digital Imaging Process - Arak

A friend of mine, IB Hari Kayana, contacted me to create a movie poster for his short documentary movie titled Arak - The Bright Forgotten Fire. An interesting title. Especially on the subtitle of it. 

BACKGROUND

Arak is a traditional alcoholic drink in my homeland, Bali. It is made from a distilled tuak, another popular drink here in Bali. Tuak is usually an extract from coconut sap. If not, some people also create it from rice, like Japanese sake. So from this tuak, it is fermented for quite some time until it contains higher alcohol. Then it's distilled with fire and traditional utensils, to produce arak.

It is highly popular drink amongst men, especially during the religious ceremony. It is pretty normal within a group of men, drinking in a circle sharing the alcoholic drink until the last drop. It makes you drunk, indeed. 

But in Balinese culture, arak is more than just that. It has been an integral part for the religious ceremony. It is usually used as one of the offerings for the unseen dark force (bhuta kala), in a hope that they will guard us and also to create balance between the gods and evil, the good and the bad. 

CONCEPT

Back to the project, I was asked to create the poster based on the basic knowledge above. For the specific visual detail, my friend ask me to do something similar to what I create for Bali Tolak Reklamasi artwork; a sacred tree, but now with arak-related stuff. 

When thinking about Bali Tolak Reklamasi artwork I made back in 2014, I can still remember how complicated it is to build a hand imagery with images of banyan trees. Perhaps I never tried that again. I should have been easy. But I planned for something different. I want to do it in 3D modelling. I want to have a much flexible lighting customization. Individually dodge and burn those vines to create lighting effect is such a pain. Doing it in 3D would be a breeze as the light and shadows generated naturally.

Before going through, I had to define the main concept first though. Since the inspiration is coming from Bali Tolak Reklamasi artwork, there would be a sacred tree that resemblance a hand holding something. What is being held? Arak indeed. Since we are talking about a legendary thing. The arak has to be presented in an ancient way. 

In the past, Balinese arak was carried with clay pottery like in the picture below.

So, a sacred tree holding an arak clay pot. That would be the focal point. But then I was thinking, how should I display arak liquid itself? Showing the pot wouldn't be enough. There was a generation gap. I doubt many today's viewer is going to quickly recognize that the pot that I am going to create is containing arak. It could be something else. It could be tirta, a holy water in Hindu religion. 

So I decided to put some arenga tree and its nuts which is the main ingredient of arak, and also includes the arak distilling process in a creative way. Since arak is also involve some extreme heating process, besides arak is a fiery drink itself, adding fire is not a bad idea.

So here's my rough concept. Yes I used watermarked images. It was only for internal discussion and never going public in that stage. 

The concept on the left is chosen. So I move forward into the stock image hunts. 

IN THE MAKING

Since I want the tree to built in 3D yet I don't have specific skill for making it, I went deep into some 3D forums on making a 3D tree model. 

I found Speedtree Modeler. I do quick crash course to learn it. Thankfully it was an easy learning curve for basic operation. It was really easy to create and customize 3D tree with this program. I transferred the model into Cinema4D for rendering. 

The clay pot. I tried to find the stock image, but nothing comes close to the one in the old picture I shared above. So I decided to create it in 3D because I think it was easy to create due to its simple shape.

After that, the rest of the process is done in Adobe Photoshop. There are few tricky stuff going on during the editing. 

Adding the arenga pinnata seeds as decorations around the tree may look fun, but selecting the individual chains between tens of chains of seeds in an image is quite a tedious work. Adding lighting and shading effects is also not a breeze. But hell yeah, I like complicated stuff lol.

Then the amber fire effect inside the tree, I may go crazy and overdone in the final resul. But luckily I can keep it sane and I think I made it well balanced or at least, did not overly done. It was also quite time consuming there. But unlike the arenga pinnata process, this one is quite fun because the effect looked so cool.

The rest is just like another day at the office. You can watch the full speed up process in the YouTube video below.

At the end of the day, I was quite happy with the result. I sometimes gets stuck in the final tone. There was a point that I want the muted and a little monotoned tone, but then I ended up going a little bit vibrant and action-movie-poster-styled look.